throopw@rtp47.UUCP (Wayne Throop) (10/14/85)
> To Wayne: You have indicated that your own notions of arithmatic in > such matters show the ultrasaur to be "just barely possible". What then > is your opinion of the Breviparopus, the creature known only by tracks, > described in the Avon Field Guide to Dinosaurs and in other recent > articles, which, to judge from the tracks, would have totally dwarfed > even the ultrasaur? As I've said before, it seems quite reasonable to me that even very large sauropods could get around. There are far more problems with lessened gravity than with unweildy sauropods. For one trivial example, note that the weight estimates are made consistant with depth of tracks (among other factors). If the gravity was lesser, why did physical phenomena other than animal size not reflect it? That is, why didn't tracks and other physical evidence show that things in general were pressed less forcefully against the ground? You imply strongly that tidal forces caused your hypothetical gravity drain. Then when the hypothesis is "disproven" every bit as thoroughly as you have "proven" sauropod size to be "impossible" (if not more so), you simply switch to another line, saying it wasn't the tides after all, but magnetism (of all things). To summarize, you think that some "megafauna" are too large to have competed in a 1-g gravity. To explain this, you introduce a mythical connection between gravity and magnetism that has never been observed, have the earth and a couple of other planets do a hula for which there is no evidence, and totally ignore several conservation laws... and all this is supposed to be preferable to beleiving that oversized animals could have competed effectively in earth gravity? I'm afraid my chin would be very bloody if I shaved with such a dull Occam's Razor. > To Jeff: > I appreciate the effort (the calculations on Saturn), but you're wasting > your time with this one for two reasons. Number one is that Saturn may > have been more massive prior to the flood than after. Your assertion that Saturn might have been more massive in the "Age of Kronos" doesn't help you out tidal-force-wise. Mass (and hence tidal force) increases as the cube of the radius of the object. But tidal force also *decreases* as the cube of the distance between the two bodies. Since with current mass, a given tidal force (1/2 g) implies that the distance between the two bodies is less than the radius of the primary, increasing the mass would still leave the earth inside the larger Saturn's atmosphere. I wonder what you think stabilized the Saturnian ring system with a far more massive Saturn, and why they weren't disrupted by the abrupt weakening of Saturn's gravity. To have tidal forces strong enough to have the effects you propose, Saturn would have to be not more massive, but far more dense. At a guestimate, to get a reasonable situation, Saturn would have to be far more dense than any other object in the solar system, while it is currently *less* dense. All in all, you are having to postulate more and more fantastic physical systems, just in order to make some english translations of some transcriptions of some word-of-mouth myths literally true. Next I suppose that the story of Jack and the Beanstalk will turn out to be literally true, a rememberance of a time when space travelers built an earth-to-orbit cable system, and the giant was a free-fall adapted alien, and the goose was a metaphore for technology, and on and on. All in all, the above is every bit as unconvincing as the "Age of Kronos". (Well, maybe not *that* unconvincing.) -- Wayne Throop at Data General, RTP, NC <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!rtp47!throopw